Speaker
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Authors: 1. M. Teresa Durán (IRA, Switzerland) 2. Youcef Nedjadi (IRA, Switzerland) 3. Frédéric Juget (IRA, Switzerland) 4. CLaude Bailat (IRA, Switzerland)
Digital electronic systems for primary activity measurement methods are gaining ground in the reference laboratories all over the radionuclide metrology community. A wide range of alternatives is available on the market and the choice is not always easy as it depends on the circumstances, needs and capacities of each laboratory. In our case, IRA primary laboratory started in the transition to digital systems with a National Instruments system with very high performances that had to be programmed and tailored to our applications from the very beginning by the users. The continuation of this project was to complement and back up this system with the purchase of plug-and-play digitizers by CAEN. A comparative study of both system's approaches is presented in this work as a paradigm of the digital scene in radionuclide metrology laboratories. Different tests were carried out to evaluate and compare performance parameters such as: signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at different energies, gamma energy resolution, time measurement accuracy and resolution and counting efficiency. The activity measurement of Co-60 and Ba-133 sources was performed by β-γ digital coincidence counting using both devices in parallel and the resulting activities are compared to demonstrate the overall performances.
